An extremist, not a fanatic

October 13, 2016

Avner Offer says economics is “more like literature than like physics”. This might be seen as high-class trolling. Physics contains sums which are hard and scientific and manly, whereas literature is girly and so obviously inferior. For this reason, some economists have long had physics envy, writing papers whose titles offer “exact solutions” and “robust optimization”.

Such a reaction is wrong. Offer is right in ways that reflect both credit and discredit upon economics.

Let’s deal with the discredit first. Economists’ attempts to emulate physics have at least sometimes failed. Romer’s critique of “mathiness” and McCloskey’s accusation of scientism have some force. There’s nothing necessarily scientific about long lines of equations: Ronald Coase’s two (pdf) great papers (pdf), for example, gave fantastic insights without any.

What’s more, economics is more like literature than physics in that it doesn’t always progress. We can read 19th century novels with profit, but few physicists would advise their students to study 19th century work on the subject. Likewise, we should read the classical economists, not least because they were interested in issues with much of later economics overlooked, such as the distribution of income between capital and labour.

And some economics is like literature in a bad way. Those RBC models that assume continuous labour market clearing are like Iain M. Banks’ culture novels: they describe societies which do not exist, have not existed and will not exist in our lifetimes. And a common criticism of at least early versions of DSGE models was that they were as scrupulous in ignoring important matters as Jane Austen was in ignoring the source of her gentlemen’s incomes: Charles Goodhart said of the DSGE approach that “it excludes everything I am interested in.”

Nevertheless, there are two ways in which economics is and should be like literature.

One is that it asks the same question as writers do of their characters: given his motives, information set and constraints, how does he act and with what effects? Sloppy writers and economists give simplistic and implausible answers – as in the “incentives-magic!!-nice effects” approach of simple-minded free market economics. Great writers and economists, however, are much more careful and insightful. You can think of the recent Nobel prizes given to Hart, Bengstrom and Tirole as rewards for such carefulness.

Secondly, economics must be unlike physics because there are, as Jon Elster said, no (or few) law-like generalizations in the social sciences. Instead, like literature, there can only be detailed studies of time and place – although the best such studies yield great insights.

Does this mean that economics isn’t a “science”? I side with McCloskey. It’s a stupid question. What matters is whether the study is careful and disciplined? The objection to “mathy” economics is that it doesn’t bother with the discipline imposed by pesky facts.

In this sense, economics is like literature in that in both there is a constrained subjectivity. Literary scholars might reasonably differ on whether, say, Virginia Woolf was a better writer than D.H Lawrence but most would agree that both are better than, say, Louise Bagshawe. Likewise, whilst there might be disagreement in economics, there can also be unity or at least general consensus about what constitutes rank bad economics.

October 12, 2016

“We didn’t mean that kind of Brexit” say Daniel Hannan and Andrew Lilico in response to May’s anti-immigrant proposals. To which we Remainers reply: if you ride a tiger, you shouldn’t be surprised when it bites you. As I wrote before the referendum:

some of you have a vision of a Britain outside the EU that is a free, liberal socialistic country. These are ideals with which I have sympathy. But we are kidding ourselves if we think a vote for Leave will be a move towards such a society. Instead, it’ll be a mandate for Farage and the inward-looking, reactionary mean-spirited philistinism he embodies.

But was my reasoning sound? It might not be.

I say this not because of Daniel’s claim that Leavers were motivated more by a desire to reclaim sovereignty than to cut immigration: many wanted to take back control precisely because they wanted to cut immigration, whilst others just can’t articulate why they want sovereignty.

Instead, there might be an error here: the association fallacy. Wasn’t I trying to discredit decent Leavers like Andrew and Daniel by association with indecent ones?

Let’s assume I were. Was this necessarily a bad thing?

Sometimes, we can reach the right decision because errors cancel out. For example, the erroneous belief at the roulette table that red is on a roll can correct the error that “black must be due to come up next”. Or mental accounting can protect us from spending too much through weakness of will by putting some money off limits. In similar fashion, I was trying to use the association fallacy to counter what I saw as wishful thinking by free market Leavers.

But there’s another defence of what I was doing. It’s that the association fallacy might not actually be a fallacy. It’s only one if it commits the sampling error.

Let’s take a clear example of the fallacy: “You shouldn’t be a vegetarian. Hitler was a vegetarian!” This fails because of the sampling error: the vast majority of vegetarians are not genocidal maniacs. But what if a disproportionate number were? Wouldn’t this be at least a clue that there might be something wrong with vegetarianism?

In the case of Brexit, the fact that a disproportionate* number of bigots were on the Leave side wasn’t just diagnostic of something wrong with the Leave case. It was also causal. The association of the Leave cause with anti-immigration sentiment invited the government to become hostile to immigrants. Yes, Daniel and Andrew claim that Ms May’s inference is mistaken. But this doesn’t acquit them of the charge of wishful thinking: it is naïve to hope that governments will do the right, liberal thing.

If you think this is another post about Brexit, you’d wouldn’t be wholly right. When Nick Cohen and James Bloodworth attack Corbyn and the far left for being pro-terrorist and anti-west they are asking me the same question I asked Andrew and Daniel: aren’t my ideals tarnished by association with some bad characters? And the answer is along the same lines. It depends upon proportions: how many such characters are there, and how much power do they have to pervert my intentions?

I don’t know how to answer that. My point is instead merely the trivial one that in a second-best world of bounded rationality and bad people, there becomes much more to politics than simply asserting one’s ideals.

* In saying this, I’m not claiming that all Remain voters are pro-open borders: they are not.

October 11, 2016

In an attempt to defend the indefensible, Janan Ganesh invites us to regard a “hard Brexit”* as an experiment.

Sometimes history throws up ideas that are better tested than forever stymied…ideas, unless they are plainly malign or ruinous, have to be held accountable in the end by real-world application. There is only so much mileage in the statecraft of frustrating them.

A “soft Brexit” he says would allow Leavers to claim that any ill-effects are due to “betrayal”, to not implementing Brexit properly. A “hard Brexit” would at least permit a proper “falsification of their project”. And, he adds, if things work out badly we can rejoin the EU.

One is that Brexit is not a scientific hypothesis to be discarded when it is falsified. Instead, Leavers have invested their ego in the idea; I question Janan’s claim that many are “open to falsification."** This means that if a hard Brexit is followed by economic troubles, they’ll invent immunizing strategies to deny this.

And it’ll be easy to find such strategies. One reason for this is that a “hard Brexit” will not be a genuine experiment. In a true experiment, we can compare a treatment group to a control and so discover the effects of the treatment. But after a “hard Brexit” we’ll never see the control. We’ll not see the counterfactual, what would have happened if we’d stayed in the EU.

This matters. The case for remain is not that Brexit will lead to catastrophe but that it will cause slower long-term growth; real GDP will grow by a bit less than 2% per year rather than a bit more. If this happens, Leavers will be able to claim that Brexit wasn’t so bad. But this would be entirely consistent with the Remainers being correct.

Also, the Duhem-Quine problem – that we often can’t test hypotheses in isolation - is especially severe in this case. Let’s say Brexit leads to slower growth in trade and productivity as Remainers claim. Leavers will find it easy to show other reasons for this. Exporters are “fat and lazy”; investment has been low; secular stagnation means there’s little innovation. And so on.

And the thing is, these claims will have some truth. There are always many plausible explanations for poor economic performance.

You needn’t look far for an example of what I’m saying. On Radio 4’s Today programme this morning Gerard Lyons – one of the more sensible Leavers – claimed that a weaker pound was “inevitable” because of the UK’s big current account deficit (2”14’ in). That’s a way of denying an effect of Brexit.

I very much doubt, therefore, that a “hard Brexit” is a worthwhile experiment. Even if the Remainers are correct abut its effects, most Leavers won’t admit they were wrong.

I suspect instead that Janan is giving us another example of the fact that there is no government policy so bad that it will entirely lack supporters; the corridors of power lend gravitas to even the daftest ideas. As Adam Smith said, “We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous.”

* I'm putting scare quotes around "hard Brexit" because I take Owen's point that the phrase serves framing rather than purely descriptive purposes.

** Yes, some are. But the better Brexiters such as Daniel Hannan and Andrew Lilico are already having their doubts; I'm thinking instead of fans of a "hard Brexit".

October 08, 2016

On the one hand, on the issues of immigration and Brexit, I’m with the elites.

But in other respects, I’m on the side of the people. I’ve repeatedly argued for workerdemocracy against managerialism, and have consistently pointed out the shortcomings of professional fund managers. And I’ve pointed out that popular opinion – as measured by ratios (pdf) of consumer spending to asset prices – can do a better job of forecasting future economic conditions than professional forecasters can manage.

So, am I just confused?

No. There’s a logic to my position which is lacking in extreme pro- or anti-elitism. To see it, remember that crowds are wise only under specific conditions. These are:

- Beliefs are uncorrelated, so there’s no herding or information cascades.

- There’s a diversity of belief, with people drawing on their personal and perhaps tacit knowledge of local circumstances.

- People have incentives to get the decision right.

I side with the people when these conditions are in place. This is true of the ability of consumption-wealth ratios to predict future economic conditions. This works because each individual decides his spending according to personal circumstances: is my job safe? Will I get a decent bonus? Do I have good prospects? And so on. And everyone has an incentive to get the decision right: spending too little means unnecessarily depriving yourself whilst spending too much means uncomfortable retrenchment later. Granted, it’s possible for spending decisions to be influenced by peer pressure. But I suspect this mechanism is often not powerful enough to offset the strength of the other conditions.

I suspect too that these conditions would often facilitate worker democracy. Each worker has local specific information about how the firm might increase efficiency, and has skin the game (job-specific human capital) that incentivizes him to express a good opinion.

However, in the case of Brexit, these conditions are absent. Voters’ beliefs are correlated, by virtue of being unduly influenced by the shit media (including the BBC) as well as by cognitive biases. There’s little local, fragmentary knowledge to be aggregated: not many voters were swayed by their personal experiences of dealing with the EU. And they didn’t have skin in the game: many older voters believed, sadly correctly, that the costs of Brexit would be borne by others.

Herein lies the paradox. Although there exist good criteria for adjudicating when we should trust the people and when the elites, I seem to be the only one who applies these criteria. Instead, popular opinion distrusts elites when they should be believed – for example on Brexit – and yet believes them when they should be distrusted: there’s insufficient demand for worker democracy, and far too much trust still placed in fund managers.

What we’re seeing, therefore, in today’s populism is the exact opposite of what intelligent, evidence-based class war should be.

October 07, 2016

Philip Hammond promised this week “to renew and expand Britain’s infrastructure”. This might represent a return to Keynesianism in more ways than one.

The obvious sense is that he’ll be using fiscal policy counter-cyclically, supporting the economy during a time of Brexit-induced uncertainty; economists expect real GDP growth of only 0.7 per cent next year, well below long-term averages.

But there’s another sense. Keynes also looked forward to “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment.” Hammond might push us in this direction.

My chart, taken from ONS and OBR data, puts this into historical context. It compares business investment to public sector investment. You can see that in the early 70s the two were similar. Then during the 1979-97 Tory government public sector investment declined markedly. From the late 90s until 2010 however the gap between public and business investment narrowed, until Osborne’s austerity and a pick-up in business investment widened the gap again.

It’s possible that the next few years will see a resocialization of investment, to the extent that Hammond raises public sector investment at a time when Brexit uncertainty, as well as secular stagnation, holds down private sector investment.

In truth, though, there’s another force which might resocialize investment – relative prices. Infrastructure spending is prone to an element of Baumol’s cost disease. Because construction tends to have relatively slow labour productivity growth, its relative cost rises over time. However, to the extent that business investment comprises spending on IT, it benefits from Moore’s law and so sees a fall in relative prices. These trends alone would tend to raise the share of public investment in GDP over time, and depress that of business investment: my chart shows ratios of investment to GDP in current prices.

And herein lies a problem. It’s widely agreed that better infrastructure would raise productivity: better roads and broadband would make us more efficient. But there’s a downside here. A greater share of infrastructure spending in GDP, and smaller share of business investment, would tend to depress productivity growth because of brute maths – because a sector with low productivity growth accounts for a bigger share of GDP.

I like to think that the former effect will prevail – and it probably will initially. Over the very long-run, however, this might be more doubtful.

October 06, 2016

If a man asks for a lot of rotting fish, should we blame the fishmonger for giving it him? I’m prompted to ask by David Aaronovitch’s piece in the Times attacking the Tories’ anti-immigration rhetoric.

The objection to David’s argument, of course, is that the government is giving the public what it wants. It wants stinking fish.

Of course, in saying this I sound like the sort of elitist May sneered at yesterday. Nevertheless, people like David and I have a real problem that, in truth, dates back centuries: how can we reconcile democracy with good government?

One answer, advanced recently by Jason Brennan, is that we can’t. He says:

Most voters are ignorant of both basic political facts and the background social scientific theories needed to evaluate the facts. They process what little information they have in highly biased and irrational ways. They decided largely on whim. And, worse, we’re each stuck having to put up with the group’s decision. Unless you’re one of the lucky few who has the right and means to emigrate, you’re forced to accept your democracy’s poorly chosen decisions.

He advocates epistocracy, in which “political power is to some degree apportioned according to knowledge.”

That’s – ahem – brave. Historically, we’ve used other ways of reconciling democracy and good government. One way has been to preface democracy with “liberal”, so that people’s rights act like “trumps” to over-ride the tyranny of the majority. Another way was proposed by Edmund Burke – yes, the same Burke that May praised in her speech yesterday. He said MPs should use deliberative judgment rather than act as mere delegates enforcing the popular will:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion… parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament. If the local constituent should have an interest, or should form an hasty opinion, evidently opposite to the real good of the rest of the community, the member for that place ought to be as far, as any other, from any endeavour to give it effect.

Proposals for deliberative democracy such as those from Archon Fung and Joel Rogers among others are attempts to revive this ideal.

Herein, though, lies a paradox. On the one hand, the need to explore these various ways of cleansing voters’ preferences has become more pressing in recent years not just because of the rise of racism – let’s call it what it is – but because we have ever-growing evidence that people have limited rationality, knowledge and attention. I’m not sure if Jason Brennan, BryanCaplan (pdf), Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely and me would agree upon much, but we agree on this.

On the other hand, though, we’ve also seen a rise in a crude consumer sovereignty view of politics in which the voter is king whose preferences must be respected and whose “legitimate concerns” must be heeded.

It’s this latter view which must be challenged. We must ask: can we change voters’ minds? How can we reconcile democracy with better government? Partisan attacks on the Tories’ brutal and economically illiterate anti-immigration attitudes are right and necessary, but they deflect attention from much deeper questions.

October 05, 2016

What I mean is that Marx and Engels saw the state as a means of promoting capitalists’ interests. It is, said Engels, "the instrument for exploiting wage-labour by capital".

However, this government seems not to be acting in capital’s interests. Its desire for tougher immigration controls is opposed by both the CBI and British Chambers of Commerce; even the FT calls the government “jackbooted overlords”. And the pursuit of a hard Brexit is generating uncertainty and jeopardizing the City’s future business.

Given this, how can we Marxists claim – as the Communist Manifesto did – that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”?

There are two answers here.

First, we should distinguish between the policies of any particular government and the basic structure of the state. It’s plausible that the latter serves capitalists’ interests. For example, intellectual property laws protect monopoly power; banks get an implicit subsidy because of the prospect of being bailed out in bad times; government procurement and the Private Finance Initiative serve as forms of corporate welfare*; schools act as ideological state apparatuses indoctrinating students to act in capital’s interests; and the welfare state helps reduce business uncertainty whilst work assessment schemes ensure a high supply of labour. And so on.

Secondly, the state doesn’t always slavishly follow the requirements of capital. Engels went on to say:

Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both.

This inspired Ralph Miliband’s theory of the relative autonomy of the state:

[State] power has often been used for purposes and policies which were not only pursued without reference to the capitalist class, but also at times against the wishes of many parts of that class, or even the whole of it…The state does not, normally and of its own volition, intervene in class struggle on the side of labour. But this does not mean that it is necessarily subservient to the purposes and strategies of capital. It is in fact often compelled, by virtue of its concern for the defence and stability of the social order, to seek some intermediate position, and to act upon it, however much that position may differ from the position of capital. (Divided Societies, p 31-32).

This is what we’re seeing now. Capital is relatively weak which has given the state an unusual degree of autonomy. Capitalism’s failure to deliver rising living standards (a process exacerbated by Osborne’s austerity) has generated a nationalist backlash which May feels compelled to accommodate even at a cost to business.

In this sense, May’s policies aren’t a refutation of a Marxian theory of the state after all.

But this poses a question. Mightn’t the notion of relative autonomy serve as what Popper called an “immunizing strategy” – a way of protecting Marx’s theory of the state from any possible refutation? If so, what would refute that theory?

Simple. If the state were to maximize labour’s bargaining power at the expense of capital – for example via a high citizens income, jobs guarantee and promotion of worker coops – it would cease to be “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. Until this happens, however, Marx’s theory of the state looks reasonably valid.

* Yes, estimates of the size of the corporate welfare state are flawed, but this doesn’t change the fact that big government does help capitalists, which is why so few capitalists are libertarians.

October 04, 2016

One of the most egregious of cognitive biases is the confirmation bias - our tendency to see what we want. We’re seeing examples of this today, with Brexiteers cheering FTSE’s rise whilst Remainers point to sterling’s fall.

In truth, these are two sides of the same coin. One reason why the Footsie has risen might well be that sterling’s fall is expected to be permanent, and so will raise overseas earnings – which account for around three-quarters of the FTSE 100’s total earnings. It’s no accident that today’s biggest risers include a lot of overseas earners, such as Pearson, Standard Chartered and Royal Dutch.

We can put this in more sophisticated terms. Uncovered return parity (pdf) tells us that, in the absence of shocks, equity returns should be equalized across countries so that a relatively strong stock market should be accompanied by a weaker currency and vice versa.

But of course, that phrase “in the absence of shocks” is doing a lot of work. If a country were to enjoy a positive growth shock, its stock market should rise relative to others in common currency terms. This is because investors would buy the equities in the hope of rising dividends, and perhaps the currency too in anticipation of higher interest rates as a consequence of that faster growth.

So, is this what the UK has enjoyed? No. Quite the opposite. Since June 23, MSCI’s index of UK stocks has fallen by 3.3 per cent in US dollar terms* whilst the MSCI world index has risen 2.7 per cent.

This underperformance of six per cent is consistent with the sort of long-term hit to GDP which NIESR and the CEP (pdf) expect from Brexit. Is that a coincidence?

Granted, Brexiteers are right to say that the lower pound will stimulate exports and output. But Remainers are also right to say that the pound has fallen precisely because investors expect weaker growth as a result of Brexit: it’s fall in the last few days might well be due to the perceived increased prospect of a “hard Brexit”.

The fact that UK equities have under-performed in common currency terms since June 23 tells us that the stock market believes that, on balance, the latter effect outweighs the former. This is consistent with empirical evidence which tells us that past falls in sterling haven’t had a huge impact on net exports**.

If stock markets are saying anything, it is that they agree with mainstream economists that Brexit will harm the UK.

Let’s put this in context, though. The UK’s underperformance since June is actually quite small in the context of its under-performance since mid-2014. That’s due in part to the UK’s bigger weighting in mining stocks. But it might also be because expectations for relative growth were falling even before this June: small caps and the FTSE 250 are well down in dollar terms since mid-2014.

I must, however, caveat all this massively. Drawing strong inferences from noisy and complex phenomena is dangerous, and downright daft when those inferences are politically motivated. And paying attention to short-term market fluctuations is almost to invite error – in particular, the mistake of myopic (pdf) loss aversion (pdf). Charles Kindleberger used to say that “Anyone who spends too much time thinking about international money goes mad.” The same applies to stock market moves.

* I’ve updated this to include today’s rise in UK shares and fall in sterling.

** Yes, the UK economy did nicely after we left the ERM in 1992. But this was probably due more to the monetary and fiscal easing than to the pure exchange rate effect.

October 01, 2016

In a typically great post, Rick challenges the notion that people born between the mid-40s and mid-60s represent some kind of homogenous generation. I agree, and want to amplify his post in two ways.

First, one reason why there’s a massive difference between those born in the mid-40s and those in the mid-60s is that our formative years were very different. The mid-40s generation left school in the early 60s, a time of full employment when even the unqualified could walk into albeit unsatisfying work. My generation left school at a time of high and rising unemployment. This is the difference between Arthur Seaton and Damon Grant*.

In the early 80s, a typical domestic scene in declining industrial areas between my friends and contemporaries and their dads went as follows:

Dad: Get a job.

Son: What as – a unicorn farmer?

Dad: There are jobs if you’re willing to look.

Son: No there aren’t.

Exchange of Effing and Jeffing. Son storms out, to see his grandad who, having grown up in the 1930s, gives him a sympathetic hearing.

Shared formative experiences matter more than temporal closeness; there was/is therefore a big difference between the mid-40s and mid/late 60s generations.

Academic research backs this up. A recent paper by Nathanael Vellekoop finds:

The more aggregate unemployment an individual has experienced during his or her lifetime, the lower the score on agreeableness, emotional stability, extraversion and openness.

This corroborates work (pdf) by Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel who have found that growing up in hard times makes people risk averse even decades later, and Henrik Cronqvist who has found that:

Investors with adverse macroeconomic experiences (e.g., growing up during the Great Depression or entering the labor market during an economic recession) or who grow up in a lower socioeconomic status rearing environment have a stronger value orientation several decades later.

There’s a common theme here. Recessions make us distrustful; we prefer the pound on the table to the promise of two down the road. Rick is bang right to highlight the massive gulf between hippies and my generation who have plain contempt for “all you need is love” drivel*. This gap is based upon diametrically opposite economic experiences.

But there’s something else. When Rick says that we 60s-born generation face a harder and shorter retirement than those born in the 40s, he’s describing a difference between averages. But of course averages conceal big variations. Some of us are considering retirement whilst many others are 15-20 years from it.

And herein, of course, lies the problem with any discussion of generational difference: it avoids the fact that there is a massive class divide. Both the right and some of the narcissistic left avoid this fact. But some things are true whether you believe them or not.

September 30, 2016

At this week’s Labour conference, Tom Watson told members to stop “trashing” the record of New Labour. This raises a paradox – that if any party should be attacking the record of a successful recent leader, it should be the Tories, not Labour.

Put yourself in the shoes of a Tory loyalist. You support Osborne’s introduction of a National Living Wage. But Thatcher was opposed to state intervention to support wages, and allowed Wages Councils to wither (though it was the Major government that finally abolished them). You want to withdraw from the single market if this is necessary to control immigration – but it was Thatcher who helped create that market. You want to reintroduce grammar schools – but Thatcher abolished many of them. You support Philip Hammond’s promise to “reset” fiscal policy – but Thatcher preached the need for “good housekeeping.” You’re worried that immigration will undermine traditional communities – but Thatcher destroyed many of these in mining areas. You support Ms May’s desire to put workers onto company boards – but Thatcher championed “management’s right to manage.”

From this perspective, Tories should be trashing Thatcher’s policy. However, I very much doubt that her name will be booed whenever it is mentioned at next week’s conference, and Tories don’t use the word “Thatcherite” as a term of abuse in the way Labour members use the word Blairite.

Why is this? It’s not because, on domestic policy, Corbynistas are as distant from Blairism as May is from Thatcherism. They support New Labour policies such as tax credits, minimum wages and infrastructure spending.

Instead, there are other reasons. One is that Blair has become synonymous with the war in Iraq, whereas Thatcher was smart enough (or lucky enough) to start a war she could win.

Also, “Thatcherism” and “Blairism” function much as House Stark or House Bolton do – as indicators of tribal loyalties rather than ideology. Tories can think of themselves as Thatcherite even whilst renouncing many of her policies because they regard her as one of their tribe: she was on the right side of the class war. Even in his pomp, however, many Labour members never really regarded Blair as “one of us”.

There’s something else. Tories don’t think so much about political ideas: they don’t “problematize” or “workshop” them. Instead, as Oakeshott said (pdf), governing is for them a “specific and limited activity” to be gotten on with rather than theorized about. This often leads them to value unity over theoretical arguments - at least when Europe isn't at stake. And because people aren’t very good at thinking, and because there’s a thin line between being principled and being a sanctimonious twat, this gives them a big advantage.